Your business competitors aren’t the only ones providing the same products or services that you do. For example, you have search engine optimization (SEO) competitors, who may not necessarily be players in your industry, but are players in the online landscape. SEO competitors are websites that rank high due to the search queries you’re also competing for.

SEO competitor analysis is checking out your industry’s online competitive landscape, identifying your competitors and their strategies, analyzing the information you collect and using it to boost your website’s SEO.

SEO isn’t reserved for Google. In fact, any platform with an algorithm has some form of optimization, including Facebook and Instagram. Today’s article focuses on using Instagram for SEO competitor analysis. Keep reading to learn more.

Instagram SEO Competitor Analysis

So, you’ve put out great content, and your SEO strategy is on point; but still, your website isn’t ranking on the top page, and other pages are. What exactly are these pages doing to obtain organic searches? This is where SEO competitor analysis comes in. It’s not enough to just put out great content. You have to cover all the loopholes, including what your competitor is doing that you aren’t.

The same concept applies to Instagram’s SEO competitor analysis. If your Instagram page is to thrive in the sea of competitive Instagram pages, you’ve got to optimize your SEO and ensure that it tops that of your competitors. You can do this by analyzing their page, and there are several tools like Insta stalker and others that can help you.

Here’s a step-to-step guide on how you can use Instagram for SEO competitor analysis:

Step One: Identify Your Instagram Competitors

Your brand on Instagram will always have direct and indirect competitors. For example, some brands offer the same products and services as your business but appeal to a different target audience. On the other hand, some brands may offer different types of goods and services, but their target audience is the same as yours. Therefore, it’s essential to identify these two sets of competitors as the first step in your competitor analysis.

When identifying your competitors, SEO experts recommend choosing three to five of them. However, you don’t want to choose too many since the analysis will be overwhelming, yet too few competitors may not represent the market as it is.

When compiling the list of competitors, ensure there’s a big and small brand. The competitors you choose should show a great deal of progressive growth. Including one industry leader or content creator would also be best, even if they aren’t necessarily a business. This helps your business stay on trend. For example, if you’re in the make-up industry, adding a top MUA to your list of competitors will help you keep up with make-up and skincare trends and know what your target customers are looking for.  

You identify your competitors by using these metrics used in SEO to rank Instagram accounts:

• Search Text

Ideally, when you want to search for something on Instagram, you place the text In the search box and tap on the search icon. That’s the search text, except when searching for your competitors, you need to have the necessary keywords as your search text. Therefore, the first thing to do is identify what your competitors are searching for, then search for it.

For example, if your business deals in luxurious items, your keyword might be luxurious jewelry. When you type the keyword into the search box, the results will reveal several accounts with the term luxurious jewelry included in their profiles. These accounts are your competitors and are the brands that get the highest engagement in your niche.

• Use Hashtags

These are tab-labeled tags that use the same keywords you use for search text. It shows your competitors’ tags to drive traffic to their content. The topmost tags in the search results are the most popular; hence, that’s where you want to base your research. Each tag shows a bunch of posts from different accounts. You can pick which accounts you’d like to analyze from this selection.

• Use the ‘Suggested For You’ Option

On the 2022 updated Instagram account, there’s an ‘add’ icon on the far right after the edit profile button. That’s the ‘Suggested For You’ button. When you click on it, it’ll give you a list of accounts that deal with the same products and services as your business. From that list, you’re likely to find your competitors.

Step Two: Analyze Your Competitor’s Accounts While Comparing It to Yours 

Now that you have a list of competitors, it’s time to look into their accounts to establish why they’re performing better than you. When analyzing your competitors’ Instagram accounts, consider these:  

• Their Following

Although a large following isn’t always an indication of a successful business, you might want to know why and how your biggest competitor has a large following.

A large organic following shows that the competitor’s brand is well-liked. Therefore, by analyzing their following, you may establish what they’re doing to make their brand more likable than yours. Also, when looking at followers, check on the growth rate. Is it growing, or has it stagnated? Your focus should be on account with a growing following.

• Content Strategy

Next, you want to check how your competitor posts their Instagram content. Start by checking the number of posts in the account, then check how frequently they’re posted. Most top brands are consistent with posting content.

You also want to check the type of content they post, especially if they’re direct competitors. This may help you identify gaps in the kind of content you post, and you may generate new ideas for your content.

Content strategy also means checking on when your competitors post their content. For example, depending on your industry, you may notice that content posted on Wednesday morning has more engagements than any other day. It means that on Wednesday morning, you should post content that’s more likely to generate leads and conversions.

However, since consistency is key, you should always have good content for the rest of the days. To arrive at the best posting days and time for content in your industry, you may have to compare data from more than one competitor. Otherwise, only deciding on posting time based on one competitor may be misinformation.

• Engagements

It’s one thing to post content, yet it’s another for your target audience to be receptive to it. If you want to determine the quality of the content and whether you should take tips from their content strategy, look at the account’s engagement levels. The metrics of engagements are shown by the number of likes, comments and shares and reposts.

• Hashtags

Brands use hashtags to boost organic traffic to their account. By analyzing the hashtags your competitors are using, you’ll deduce what hashtags to include to reach your target audience if you share the same target audience, and the number of hashtags they use per post. You can also use hashtags to help you look for new influencers for your marketing.

• Check On Their Customers

Researching your competitors’ customers will help you determine who they are and why they chose your competitor. You can find their customers from reviews and testimonials. In this case, such reviews may be posted in the comment section. However, go a step further and check for reviews posted on your competitor’s website.

Checking the reviews will help you determine the level of customer satisfaction and precisely why they’re happy or satisfied with your competitor’s services. You can then use these points to help better your market position.

• Popularity Signals

Popular content is likely to rank higher for SEO. Sometimes, running a business may be so overwhelming that you don’t have time to stay on top of popular trends. Therefore, while conducting a competitor analysis, check for popularity signals.

Popularity signals are measured according to the number of likes, clicks, shares, hashtags, place tags, or follows. If your competitor is following popular trends and it’s working out, you may want to join the bandwagon.

Step Three: Analyze Your Instagram Account

The final step is to analyze your Instagram account. You’ll do this in the same order you’ve done while analyzing your competitor’s accounts. Again, analyzing your data will help you identify the loopholes in running your Instagram account. 

With the insights you gained from the steps above, you need to ask yourself how you can use the insights to enhance your Instagram account. Here are some things to consider:

• For followers: Determine whether you have enough followers to match your competitors. If not, what should you do to gain an organic following? It might require being more consistent, among other solutions.
• Content strategy: For your content strategy, revisit your consistency in posting, time for posting and the type and quality of content you post.
• Engagements: Ask yourself how your content performs and what insights you can borrow from your competitors to boost your performance.
• Hashtags: If you weren’t adding enough hashtags to your posts, you must review that. Also, as mentioned before, consider using the hashtags that are commonly used by your competitors, especially if you share the same target audience.
• Customers: The insights you collect from your competitor’s customer reviews; use them to polish up your services.
• Popularity signal: If your brand isn’t on TikTok, you might be missing out on one of the most profitable trends, especially since it’s likely that your competitors are on TikTok.

Wrapping Up

Remember, conducting SEO competitor analysis is not only for Google. You can also do it on Instagram since it has an algorithm. If you’ve wondered how to conduct SEO competitor analysis using Instagram, consider following the steps discussed above or enlisting the help of SEO experts.